According to pastor Tim Keller, Christians should be careful of getting involved in divisive politics, but should instead remember that their faith is more important than any political view.

Keller, who is the senior pastor at Redeemer Presbyterian Church in New York City, recently spoke at the Movement Day Global Cities conference held in New York City.

He spoke about how politics often divides people, including Christians, but how this ought not to be the case:

“All across the world there is a lot of political fragmentation … there is more and more political fragmentation in so many countries, and unfortunately Christians might be tempted to be fragmented right along. We might start getting divided politically instead of remembering that you’re Christian first and you’re white, black, Asian, Hispanic, second. You’re a Christian first and you’re American, or you’re British and you’re African second,” he said.

Keller went on to say that the only way for communities to change is for Christians to become unified by the gospel and to spread the love of Christ.

He said that the church ought to work to “see the urban body of Christ grow in quality and quantity faster than the population so that the salt and light of Christian love and truth will actually influence the life of that city, renew it, improving it socially, influencing it culturally and lifting up Jesus’ name so it’s increasingly respected and honored in that city.”

Keller also addressed the challenges of reaching a culture that has been so influenced by secularism.

He ended, however, by offering words of encouragement: “Every time the Church has come up against something that we’ve never faced before we’ve broken through. There is a supernatural resilience in the Church … there was this place where Jesus said, ‘upon this rock I build my Church and the gates of Hell will not prevail against it,'” he said.